


test everything to destruction (just to see if you made it right)

by Nillegible



Category: Naruto
Genre: Angel!Sakumo, Fallen Angel-Serpent!Orochimaru, Good Omens-verse, Warnings for historical battles and World War II, ineffable husbands
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-07
Updated: 2019-12-07
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:15:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21704323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nillegible/pseuds/Nillegible
Summary: Sakumo guards the Eastern gate to Eden, but he’s not sure who or what he’s guarding it from. He stands upon the ramparts, and he looks into the lush forest that She had made for the Man and the Woman just as often as he turns his back to it, looking over the endless sands and the others of God’s creatures.It's why Sakumo sees the Serpent in the garden, though he doesn’t know how he got in. The Serpent wanders around, seeming more curious than malicious, tasting fruit and chatting with Adam and Eve, and once wandering up to talk to Sakumo.“Are you supposed to be here?” asks Sakumo, holding his sword tightly in the face of a possible threat. ‘Let no one enter the garden through this gate,’ wasn’t enough for him to extrapolate what he’s supposed to do if the Enemy was already inside.
Relationships: Hatake Sakumo/Orochimaru
Comments: 10
Kudos: 54





	test everything to destruction (just to see if you made it right)

**Author's Note:**

> The title's from the book itself, one of my favorite lines ever! Also, Sakumo and Orochimaru make EXCELLENT celestial beings, I think they're perfect for this role.

Sakumo guards the Eastern gate to Eden, but he’s not sure who or what he’s guarding it _from._ He stands upon the ramparts, and he looks into the lush forest that She had made for the Man and the Woman just as often as he turns his back to it, looking over the endless sands and the others of God’s creatures.

It is why Sakumo sees the Serpent in the garden, though he doesn’t know how he got in. The Serpent wanders the garden, seeming more curious than malicious, tasting fruit and chatting with Adam and Eve, and once wandering up to talk to Sakumo.

“Are you supposed to be here?” asks Sakumo, holding his sword tightly in the face of a possible threat. ‘ _Let no one enter the garden through this gate,’_ wasn’t enough for him to extrapolate what he’s supposed to do if the Enemy was already inside.

“How do you know that I’m _not_ supposed to be?” asks the Demon, before slithering back down into the Garden. Sakumo wonders again why there are gates at all.

Sakumo actually misses the bit where Eve and Adam decide to try the forbidden fruit, though he’s there when they are banished. The gate finally makes sense as the two naïve humans take their very first steps outside the garden. It horrifies him, the idea that these two defenceless creatures were going to be on earth, fending for themselves. The woman is with child.

“Here,” he says, handing over his sword. “May it protect you both from the dangers of the world in your journeys.”

He watches them walk off into the distance and finally feels a familiar presence at his side. The great blue-black snake, with its intricate purple markings around yellow slitted eyes looks up at him.

Serpents do not have expressions, but he feels this one must be smug. It’s irritating. “Are you proud of yourself?” he asks. “They were safe here, and now you’ve got them banished.” The humans were dull creatures, really, but Sakumo has become used to protecting them. He doesn’t want them to die. When he turns around the snake has transformed into a demon, with the same yellow eyes in a decidedly lovely face.

“You gave them your sword, they’ll be fine.” Says the Serpent, then looks up to meet Sakumo’s eyes. “Was that Allowed, do you think?”

“She is fine with kindness and mercy,” says Sakumo.

“Is that so?” asks the Serpent, head tilted quizzically. “I think you’ve been disobedient, haven’t you, angel? Giving your heavenly weapon into mortal keeping. You must have despised protecting the humans, if you’re so willing to cast aside your grace and join us down below.”

“I want no such thing,” Sakumo insists. “I was worried for them.”

“Do you really think that that matters up here?” asks Orochimaru, a smirk of I-know-more-than-you gracing his face. “How much do _you_ know about those that were cast down?”

Nothing, but that Heaven ordered them gone. But it’s not in Sakumo’s job description to know, only to obey. “It is not for me to know. It cannot be known _._ The plan is _ineffable._ ” says Sakumo. It’s one of the only things he’s sure of, that by definition it cannot be known.

“If you cannot know it, how do you know it’s _right_?” asks the snake, before throwing himself off the ramparts, spreading his wings as he descends.

“Faith,” he whispers to the empty air, because Orochimaru has not stayed to hear him. _Faith,_ but he’s not sure the Serpent would accept that for an answer.

Humanity suits Orochimaru, once they crawl out of their little caves and into something like civilization. He goes wherever the humans do, starting in Ta-Mehu where the humans settle on the banks of the Nile. He joins them, and is flattered when they seem to recognize him, and make him into a goddess, a symbol of their ruling house. A god of chaos. 

It takes Sakumo a hundred years to track him down, furious. “You can’t make them worship you,” he says, grey eyes filled with the kind of wrath only Angels can muster. It requires a blind, unselfconscious belief that all the Fallen have long since shed.

“I’m only a minor goddess,” Orochimaru tells him, coiled up atop one of the smaller shrines in Memphis. “Maybe start with the greater ones, like Ra, and work your way down to me.” It’s unlikely that Sakumo will figure out that he splits his time between Wadjet and Set as the mood strikes him, and if he _does,_ then he’s sure that he can find other places that would be just as welcoming. Orochimaru _likes_ these humans.

They get better. Humans are curious, they have this desperate desire to learn and change _._ To become something _more,_ and Orochimaru finds that refreshing after millenia stuck with Angels and Demons that are equally certain of their own perfection.

The humans are… insignificant. They die too easily and too early. They wage war constantly over land that is rarely different from their own. But they also pause to make things, _art_ is not something Orochimaru was aware of until now. The humans weave cloth and make vessels which are necessary, but they always stop to make them beautiful. Heaven and the Garden were beautiful. But no one had ever tried to make them _more._

He shifts into his human form to ask “ _Why?_ ” once, of a wrinkled old woman with earth-dark skin, and rings and other bits of gold and sparkling stone in her ears and fingers and nose. He has watched for over a week as she punches intricate designs into a brass pot with her weathered hands and small, fragile looking tools. “It is for my daughter’s daughter,” she says, “to carry rice at her wedding.”

“But why have you decorated it?” he presses, since function would imply it was complete before she started.

“Because it will be beautiful,” she says, and continues with her gentle tapping. He stares at her earlobes, the flesh pierced to make room for a gold ring threaded through, watches how the lobes of her ears swing lightly when she turns her head in a way they would never have if left unadorned. He turns back into a snake, and leaves her be.

Orochimaru knew of singing, has known entire hosts of Angels who were created solely to sing Praise, but humans do it differently. They sing in their fields as they plant and harvest, or as they wander, following wild bison or fresh grazing for their animals.

They sing and they _dance._ It’s not something Orochimaru had ever imagined, but he watches as they pound mighty drums and their feet pound the Earth and he thinks of a man and a woman who lived in Paradise, but didn’t know a thing about any of this.

Eve had been a nice enough woman, for someone who didn’t know anything. He wishes she could have seen this so he could ask her, “Was it worth it? If you could choose again, would you take the bite?”

Orochimaru is self-aware enough to know that given the chance, he definitely would have offered it to her again. ‘Spread chaos, spread _anarchy,_ turn them away from all that is Good,’ They had told Orochimaru, and sent him up onto the Earth and into a garden that was supposed to be Paradise. It was a ridiculous task for someone who’d Fallen for asking _‘what does Good mean?’_ but Orochimaru thinks he’s done quite nicely.

He crosses paths with Sakumo more often than he would expect, on a world that seems bigger every day as Humans fit themselves into places they have no business being in. They just weren’t designed for life in the freezing cold, or thin air of mountain tops, or the burning heat of the dry wastelands, but that doesn’t stop them, nothing stops them, and Orochimaru wonders if it’s that same disbelief at their ingenuity that draws Sakumo to them as well.

“What a tremendous vision you manged,” Orochimaru says, when the battle is over and done, two ruined bridges and a defeated army between the battleground and the new emperor’s now conquered seat of power. Maxentius was dead, from injuries acquired in battle or the drowning, Sakumo does not know.

“Your side chose the wrong side of the Tiber,” Sakumo tells him. That had been clear, when Constantine’s army rushed them back against the river, the bridges throttling any chance for escape.

“Does it become my side if they lose?” asks Orochimaru, and he looks curious.

Of course not, Orochimaru’s sides have often won these battles between them. “Were you not supporting Maxentius? He would have continued to crush the Christians like his father did,” he says. That was why Sakumo had been sent, after all, to aid Constantine, and thus Rome’s conversion to the new faith.

“Oh,” says Orochimaru, lightly. Sakumo thinks he can still detect surprise there.

“You mean you were not supporting him?” he asks.

“No, my orders were not so specific. And nothing indicated that Maxentius would be the poorer emperor. Except, perhaps, in his choice of battleground.”

“What are you doing here then?” asks Sakumo, wary. Was there some treachery yet to pass? A planned assassination, perhaps?

“What I’ve always done,” says Orochimaru, and his yellow-sharp eyes focus on a rider riding slowly and with much fanfare and cheering from the victorious army. The man is holding something aloft, and Sakumo cringes backward when he realizes that it’s a severed human head.

Maxentius’ head.

They watch in silence as the crowd passes, though in truth even had they tried to speak it would have gone unheard in the din. After they’ve passed, after they’ve heard the jeering and jubilation and the victors’ plan to take the head all the way to Carthage, Orochimaru says, “Charming side to be on, yours.”

“I had my orders. It will be the better side,” says Sakumo.

Orochimaru just waves his hand in dismissal. “I doubt Maxentius would have been kinder, you know what happened to Severus.” Sakumo hadn’t actually heard of the former Emperor since he’d surrendered, so he doesn’t respond.

It’s not that strange of a meeting, after all. There are so many times that Sakumo has met Orochimaru on a battle-field, among the cooling corpses after the battle was done. “What is it you’ve always done?” asks Sakumo after a long silence. He’s almost afraid that he won’t get an answer.

“I watch,” says Orochimaru, “and then I ask questions. The chaos follows.”

“Where have you been?” asks Sakumo, when he finds the demon lying on the well tended grounds of a park in Vaishali. It’s an odd question for an angel to be asking of a demon, but Orochimaru has been a constant over the many thousands of years that they’ve known each other. A century without a single meeting, or even _hearing_ of some dastardly new invention that could be traced back to the Serpent was an anomaly.

And Orochimaru looks less like himself. Less well groomed. More tired. Even more serpentine than usual for his human form, which usually indicated that he was injured.

“I was in Hell,” he says. “Can’t say it was particularly pleasant.”

Sakumo has never imagined it otherwise. He doesn’t ask if the demon is alright, feels it might put an end to the tentative truce that they’ve managed to establish over time. “I’m headed to Egypt for a short series of miracles. Do you have any work in that direction?”

“Nothing specific, for now. I’m meant to be in Tahuantinsuyu next month,” says the Serpent.

Sakumo nods, mentally cancelling next month’s plans of heading into Asia minor for checking out what the Serpent was going to do in South America*. He’s about to bid farewell, about to about to go on his way when he stops to take a good look at the slightly battered demon before him.

He must have just been lounging in the sun, not even up to any small mischief. He sits down in the grass beside Orochimaru.

“Wouldn’t it be more comfortable to go somewhere cold?” he asks. If it was the memory of Hell the serpent was trying to banish, the May afternoon sun in India seemed an inefficient solution.

“It’s dark there,” he says, quietly. “I thought nowhere could have less meaning than Heaven, but I was wrong and I followed Them there.”

There’s nothing that Sakumo can say. _“I’m sorry you Fell,”_ seems indescribably callous. Especially since he’s not even sure if Orochimaru regrets it.

“Do you ever wonder,” asks Orochimaru, “What angels are meant for?”

“To complete the tasks set before us. Perform miracles, heal, nudge a few souls in the right direction…”

For some reason this makes Orochimaru chuckle. “That’s what got me, you know. I asked them _which way that was_.” It’s possibly the saddest thing he has ever heard Orochimaru say, and Sakumo grieves at the thought of Orochimaru as a young angel, just as curious then as he is now, just as prone to asking questions.

“Why would you have to ask?” Sakumo asks. “It’s obvious which the right side is.”

“Is it? Explain it to me then,” he says, and for once it’s not taunting, not the Serpent trying to poke holes in Sakumo’s faith with his silver tongue. Just an honest question that has apparently been left unanswered for centuries, and a tired demon desperately soaking up light from the sun.

“To be kind though it would be easier to be otherwise, generous when you have little, and merciful though you long for vengeance. To be humble because we cannot understand the immensity of the world and all of creation. It’s to strive for peace. To love, and be loved.”

Is that too simple an explanation? Orochimaru has turned away from him, his golden eyes looking out over the treetops and into the blue sky. It’s a heavy weight of meaning that words can scarcely do justice.

“More of the same, then. But I can almost believe that you mean it,” Orochimaru says. “But is that Heaven’s way, or yours?”

“What?” he asks, taken aback. Sakumo is the agent of Heaven on Earth, except for those little instances when Tobirama or one of the others come down with a greater Heavenly task. To imply that Sakumo’s way was different from Heaven’s was…potentially treasonous.

“I’ve watched you for five thousand years, Sakumo. And you have mostly tried to follow your virtuous way. But do you really think that heaven extends that to everyone?” There’s something else in that golden gaze now, something troubled and angry and _fierce,_ and it makes Sakumo feel ashamed of how he had just been regretting the loss of Orochimaru as an innocent angel.

This creature before him, made by God’s hands with every bit of care and attention as the others…is _breath-taking._

“You must admit that even G- _She_ does not always show mercy.”

To agree would be disloyal, and to disagree would be to _lie,_ so Sakumo holds his tongue.

“No, that’s not really fair, is it?” he says. “You disobeyed too. And then you _lied_ about it. It should’ve been the greater sin, right? Only it’s not. Because you did that and you still believe. And I don’t know if I ever did.”

“You’ve met Her,” says Sakumo, after a long and uncomfortable pause. “She made us. I don’t understand how you can still lose faith.”

“If she is ineffable,” says Orochimaru, “Did she make me just to fall?”

Sakumo has no answer.

He finds Sakumo on his knees at the center of the blast-zone. He hadn’t even known Sakumo was on this _continent_. Orochimaru himself had only arrived in time to watch the war-heads fall from the sky. He almost never watches the battles because he cannot appreciate the careless waste of lives. He has been far more interested in the German scientists’ research, more heavily rooted in toxins and biology, and far more rigorously tested than whatever the Americans had been doing with atoms.

He had regretted that only slightly, as he watched Nagasaki go up in an explosion unlike anything on Earth or Heaven. Even hell-fire did not burn so bright or leave such devastation behind. _She_ could, and often did, but then they were never allowed to question _her._ The puny humans from the Garden had done this. Orochimaru is rather impressed. Of course, they’d rather outsmarted themselves, he thinks, looking around at the wreckage. If he knew his humans, then this would be the start of something new. So clever, but so _stupid,_ he thinks, as he sees the carnage. Those who had died instantly on impact were clearly the lucky ones.

But Sakumo is kneeling here, unmoving, and he approaches cautiously to ask, “What are you doing here?” And Sakumo does not stand to accuse him of leading the humans astray yet again, or attempt to kill him, and this deviation from the pattern is… interesting. The angel doesn’t even look like he’s praying, just kneeling with his eyes closed and tears streaming down his cheeks. This isn’t the best place for it, regardless.

“Angel, you should not be here,” he says.

“How could they?” asks Sakumo, grey eyes red rimmed and tear filled when he turns and Orochimaru thinks he has never seen grief such as this, this is an angel of God brought low, and the whole world is darker for it.

“How could _you?_ ” asks Sakumo, voice hoarse, broken. Never before has he resembled a human so much and so little.

“I had nothing to do with this, I was in Europe!” he hisses. “And in China, and even Libya for a few weeks. The battle never touched North America, so I was _never there_.”

He’s not sure why Sakumo takes him at his word, but he does. “Then _how_? _”_ he asks.

Orochimaru stares at him incredulously. “ _How_? Where have you been these last millenia? The humans wage war, they kill, they slaughter. And these last few years, Nanking? Poland? The _world_? These humans, have they ever indicated that they would act differently?”

It’s bizarre that Sakumo hasn’t understood this. They have _met_ at hundreds of these massacres, have even battled each other among the mortal clashes.

Sakumo makes a keening, painful sound, fingers digging into the still warm, ash-covered ground.

“Do you find it less ineffable now?” asks Orochimaru, sitting down beside the slumped figure. Even Madara had not been so broken when he lost faith. He wonders just how much pushing it would take for Sakumo to Fall.

“You did this,” says Sakumo, and Orochimaru is offended by the accusation. hadn’t they moved beyond this by now? He has _enjoyed it_ , he will not deny, because humans are strange and fascinating and they have invented _science_ even if it is sometimes only a hasty excuse for torture. They call their warfronts _theaters,_ for Hell’s sake, as though inviting Orochimaru to come and watch. Orochimaru will take credit Downstairs for the war, this war that has consumed a hundred million human lives in six years and a day, but he does not care for _this angel_ to blame it on him.

“If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s yours,” says Orochimaru coldly. “I gave them an apple, and you gave them a _sword_.”

“No,” he says, weakly. “ _No_. They lost my sword, it’s gone.”

Orochimaru wonders if Sakumo truly believes that. “Nagato carries your sword. Though he prefers to be called War, now.” The boy was quite dedicated, though he could do with some alternative hobbies in Orochimaru’s personal opinion.

“Are you saying that _I started this?_ I never meant. I didn’t… _Please, no._ ” Sakumo is looking up at the sky like he’s praying to be absolved of this responsibility.

“Yes, I’m sure it was all just ineffable,” he says, raising an eyebrow to show Sakumo exactly what he thinks of that excuse so many years later. Orochimaru stands and dusts himself off. He’s a doctor, now, and he can help with the recovery efforts. He’s curious to know how the nuclear warhead’s victims differ from those killed by conventional explosives.

He doesn’t notice that Sakumo doesn’t get up.

**Author's Note:**

> Do drop a line to let me know what you think! I have Madara and Tobirama as Gabriel and Lucifer at the moment, but I'm wondering if I should swap that out with Hashirama. The Them will, I think, be Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura, and Orochimaru, though it'll be from SakuOro's perspective, not theirs. I'm sure I had a bit written out where Kakashi is Newton Pulsifer, but I cannot for the life of me find it, so feel free to offer suggestions for Newt and Anathema (and Agnes') casting as well, if you can think of something!
> 
> Also, I have finally reached 100k words on Ao3, and I know some authors who can finish that in a single November, and it has taken me years, but I am SO HAPPY that I've crossed that point!


End file.
